Then the same happened with languages that managed memory.
And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls.
And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.
But with that said, those who learn the underlying mechanisms will always be able to solve more problems than the folks who don't. When you know the lower pieces, your mental model tells you when and where the higher level pieces are likely to break. Legit superpower.
So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve problems other people cannot.
Yet most programmers nowadays can't write ASM or C and still manage to produce useful software.
For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill.
I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past.
The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim.
So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point.
So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.
Also anyone making a homelab has to know these stuff.
And there'll be a split too... like there's a giant divide between those mechanics who used to work on carburetors and the new gen with microcontrollers, injection systems, etc. People who think cars are 'too complicated' aren't wrong, but for someone who grew up in the injected era, i vastly prefer debugging issues over the canbus rather than snaking my ass around a hot exhaust to check something.
